Chat

Native integration with support ticketing (ours is called Help Desk, theirs is FreshDesk)

The ability to create bots (on certain plans)

The difference for live chat (as with all of their other features listed in this comparison) is the pricing. Freshworks separates nearly all of their features into separate products. And live chat is no exception.

They have a free plan, but it’s limited in features (no bots or advanced features) and it’s only for sites with up to 10,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs).

From there, the plans range from $19 -$99/mo per user.

To add support to the chat, that’s a separate product.

Gist’s live chat starts at the free plan. And all of the support products (Help Desk and Knowledge Base) are just $9 per user per month.

Winner: Gist

Virtually the same product, but it comes down to ease of use and pricing. Gist wins based on our simple all-in-one pricing.

Help Desk

Gist offers a ticketing and chat support tool, called Help Desk. It natively works with our live chat software and other tools to help SMBs provide comprehensive support for their customers and visitors.

Freshworks has a very robust and impressive support product, called “Freshdesk”.

The advantage of Freshworks is due to a few reasons.

The omnichannel support options (phone, chat, even social media)

Specific support automations

Free options that could be enough for smaller businesses (using other tools to complete the marketing and sales stack)

Where Gist takes a bit of the advantage away is via features per price.

For Freshdesk alone pricing ranges from free to $125/mo per user. That isn’t including the price for other tools you may need (i.e. chat).

For those, it would be a separate fee.

Gist gives all of our support options starting at $9/mo per user (along with many other tools).

Winner: Freshworks

When you throw in the other tools, Gist is ahead. But for the Help Desk alone, Freshworks comes out on top.

Knowledge Base

Gist and Freshworks have very similar knowledge base creation tools.

With both you can:

Create articles easily in a simple-to-use editor

Add media such as images and even video

Publish articles into an immediately searchable database easily used by your customers and support team.

The slight advantage of Freshworks is that their knowledge has a free plan along with their basic support tool.

Gist’s strength comes with the number of tools you get for the price of our plans.

Winner: None

Can’t really give the win to either. Both Gist and Freshworks have a nice-looking and highly functional knowledge base solution.

Chat Bots

There’s not a lot of information on Freshwork’s chat bots apart from a little bit about what they do:

Qualify leads

Add data to their CRM (Although, the CRM is a completely separate product with it’s own price)

Gist has ready made qualification bots for our Standard and Pro users. Our pro users can use our linear bot creation tool to build custom chatbots in around 15 minute with zero coding.

We use the bot creator to:

Add contact data for email marketing

Route customers to the right reps (sales or support)

Create intuitive and interactive FAQ bots on certain pages

Winner: Gist

Freshworks bots have similar abilities to ours, but Gist allows you to create custom robots in minutes and takes the win here.

Meetings

A meeting scheduler tool is a logical and beneficial tool in the arsenal of your sales and marketing team.

Gist’s scheduler takes about 30 seconds to sync with your Google calendar and another minute to set your availability and meeting types.

Then, you have a custom link to send to all:

Prospects

Cold leads

Anyone else who’d like to book some of your time

Freshworks doesn’t offer a meeting scheduler at this time.

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from FreshWorks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Email Marketing

Seems odd the Freshworks wouldn’t have an email marketing tool.

They already have sales sequences (which I cover further down) and email ticketing in their support product.

Gist offers email marketing with the ability to:

Collect a list of contacts

Send broadcasts and drip marketing campaigns

Create emails based on behaviors and setup up other automations

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from FreshWorks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Marketing Automation

Freshworks and Gist both have automation tools.

That said, the features within those tools are vastly different. I would say it’s like comparing apples to oranges, but it’s more like apples to footballs.

Freshworks has a ton of cool features, but with the individual product pricing, they run users $159/mo for up to 350,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs). Sure, there’s a free plan that’s fun, but it lacks the cool features of their automation platform.

Winner: Gist

Again, comparing apples to footballs. But I give the win to Gist based on the practicality and usable tools for marketing. Freshworks gives a ton of data (heat maps, split testing, etc.). But Gist is a functional marketing automation tool.

CRM

Freshworks offers a CRM tool, called “Freshsales”.

The CRM has some cool features and seems like a pretty comprehensive solution. It includes intelligent workflows and other tools not seen in many CRMs and the pricing is reasonable (although separate from the other tools).

Gist is working on a CRM that will be available soon, but it’s not out quite yet.

Winner: Freshworks

Without comparable features from Gist, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Freshworks.

Sales Sequences

With Freshsales, you get so many bulk emails to be sent every month.

On their lowest plan $19/mo per agent, you get 250 bulk emails. That goes up to up to 2000/mo on their $79/mo per agent plan.

While you could configure Gist to send sales emails, it’s not something that is native to our platform. That said, we are working to provide this feature soon.

Winner: Freshworks

Without comparable features from Gist, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Freshworks.

Event Tracking

Here’s another apples to footballs comparison (see the marketing automation section of this comparison).

Freshworks offers forms of event tracking in both their marketing tool, “Freshmarketer” and their sales tool, “Freshsales”.

Freshwork’s sales tool has event tracking that is very similar to Gist’s and can be natively used with their CRM.

However, to get all of their event tracking capabilities, you would need to either:

Purchase both a Freshmarketer and Freshsales plan (which for the full features would run you over $200/mo per user.

Get a custom quote for the entire suite of 10 individual products offered by Freshworks.

With Gist, you get all of our automation and event tracking for $149/mo with up to 5 users (and $25/mo for every user after that).

Winner: Gist

Going to give the win to Gist here based on the fact that Freshworks is more expensive and doesn’t offer that much of a difference.

Forms

Forms allow site owners to collect contact data and send leads/subscribers into the marketing funnel.

Gist’s lightweight form creator allows you to create 6 different types of forms and set the display conditions to have them show up whenever and wherever you choose.

Freshworks isn’t focused on email for marketing purposes and doesn’t have a form creation tool at this time.

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from Freshworks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Pricing

Freshworks pricing is perhaps one of the most intricate of any other software tool in any of the marketing, sales and support spaces.

Almost every one of their features is packaged as an individual product, complete with its own pricing page. Recently, Freshworks did unveil “Freshworks 360”. This product seems to be the all-in-one of all of their tools.

Unfortunately, it’s a quote-only pricing model.

The only prices you can see are the 10 different products (most with multiple tiers of payment plans).

One of the benefits of Freshworks is that most of their products come with a free plan. And the free plans aren’t that bad.

The plans get higher (on most, not all) based on the visitor count of your site. This is a basically fair way to organize it, event though it’s a bit more confusing. Added to this confusion is that the pricing plans are also based on features within those products.

For instance, their live chat is free (with limited features) for up to 10,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs). The next plan is $19/mo per user and has more features with up to 200,000 MUVs.

To unlock everything for solely the live chat product is $99/mo per user for all of the live chat features (including bots) and up to 500,000 MUVs.

Then, there are 9 more individually-priced products — most of which we’ve covered in this comparison.

Gist’s pricing is considerably simpler and more affordable (especially when you start stacking on products with Freshworks).

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